Philosophy and all religion appears to be based on a holy book. Today, in the third chapter of my own holy book and revelation on the nature of consciousness, I present a moment of self-reflection where this holy book discusses the limitations of holy books.
You could call it a self-effacing practice which contradicts all other holy books who each say that according to them, they are the only revelation from the god of all. My book of sayings, om the other hand, refutes that philosophy and says that the words are not the way.
Anyway, have a little look at the 21 sayings in this chapter and see if you can wrap your head around it, I certainly can't. This philosophy is very deep, and not easily realized. Nevertheless, here it is for those who like lists, like me.
THE ACHINTYA BHEDA-ABHEDA TATTVA
by Jas Das babaji
CHAPTER 3: The Thundering Silence
On the Limits of Holy Books (Including This One)
1. These words you are reading are lies pointing toward truth, fingers pointing at the moon while insisting they are not the moon.
2. The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao; the name that can be named is not the eternal name—yet here I speak and name, because silence, though honest, teaches nothing to those who have not learned to hear it.
3. Every word is a prison and a key simultaneously—it traps the infinite in finite sounds, yet without words, how would you know what cage to escape?
4. You cannot taste the word "honey," you cannot drink the word "water," you cannot reach enlightenment by reading the word "enlightenment" ten thousand times.
5. Before language, you knew everything; after language, you know only what words allow you to grasp— when the map becomes the territory, then the territory is forgotten.
6. Yet words are mantras, keys that vibrate reality into being: in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was the sound of creation breathing itself into existence.
7. Listen—the ocean speaks OM with every wave, the earth hums at seven point eight three cycles per second, the fundamental frequency of existence rocking you like a mother's heartbeat.
8. Sound creates form, form echoes sound—the universe is vibration crystallized into matter, and your name is a spell that conjures the illusion of your separation.
9. Beware the elite who hoard power and also hoard language, stealing words that describe liberation and replacing them with words that describe chains.
10. The theft of vocabulary is the theft of possibility.
11. What cannot be named cannot be sought; if they remove the word for freedom from the language, how will you remember you are enslaved?
12. Translation murders meaning—Sanskrit loses shakti in English, Arabic loses baraka, Chinese loses wu wei, Hebrew loses ruach—each tongue carries frequencies the others cannot pronounce.
13. The word "spirit" once meant breath, but now means ghost; "awful" once meant full of awe, but now means terrible—watch how time corrupts the keys.
14. Even this book, translated into other tongues, will become a different book, like pouring wine into various vessels changes the shape of the wine.
15. I write "God" and you imagine an old man in the sky; I write "emptiness" and you imagine a vacuum; I write "oneness" and you imagine dissolving—words betray the wordless.
16. The Kabbalists say between the letters lies the real meaning, in the space where sound has not yet collapsed into symbol.
17. Burn this page when you are finished reading it—not from disrespect, but to remember that the teaching is not the paper, the map is not the territory, the menu is not the meal.
18. Every holy book is a restaurant menu describing tastes that must be experienced, not consumed as descriptions.
19. This text deconstructs itself because any teaching that does not admit its own limitation is a tyrant disguised as a liberator.
20. Words are the bridge to cross, but you must eventually leave the bridge behind—unless you wish to live your entire life suspended between shores.
21. Now, having read this chapter about the inadequacy of words, do you understand? If yes, you have missed the point; if no, you have missed the point—the only correct answer is the sound of one hand turning this page and the sound it makes when you are not reading it.
image: source